Contentions

Democrats aren’t the only ones feeling gloomy today. Despite the likelihood that the Republican Party will retake the Senate and increase its majority in the House, some Tea Party conservatives look around the country at the GOP’s roster of candidates and say they’ve been cheated. Rather than win by nominating hard-core right-wingers wherever possible, the party has, instead, put forward a more mainstream electoral cast including many that have been labeled, whether fairly or unfairly, as establishment types. That leads people like Erick Erickson to label today’s results a “hollow victory” in a Politico Magazine article. But while many Tea Partiers may share some of his frustration about the GOP establishment, they should reject his reflexive disgust and embrace this opportunity to not only act as a break on the Obama administration’s liberal agenda but to actually govern.

Let’s concede that Erickson and other Tea Partiers are not crazy to be suspicious about the Republican leadership. They remember what happened the last time the GOP had control of both houses of Congress. The reason there is a Tea Party movement is due to the fact that during the George W. Bush administration, the party was rightly perceived to have embraced a tax-and-spend mentality that helped dig the country a hole that it has not yet climbed out of. The pointless discussions about who is a RINO (Republican in name only) inevitably descend into tests of purity whose aim is to demonstrate which conservatives are holier than anyone else. Yet the question of who is a big-government Republican is a serious one that should influence the new freshman class of Senators and Representatives to avoid the mistakes made during the reign of error presided over by former Speaker Denny Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

But Erickson’s animus seems not to be so much focused on whether the next Republican majority will avoid the temptations of big government and resume spending like drunken sailors as it is on those that sought to avoid the kind of disasters that cost the party golden opportunities to win the Senate in 2010 and 2012. Erickson is still angry with national Republican political consultants such as Karl Rove and people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who worked hard to recruit Senate candidates based on whether they could win rather than on their conservative purity. The result was that Tea Party insurgents in states like Kansas and Mississippi were defeated and establishment Republicans won.

Not all of these decisions were wise. Certainly, the GOP must look back at the effort to ensure that Pat Roberts was given the party’s Senate nomination rather than a Tea Party rebel with some mixed feelings. Roberts is the poster child for out-of-touch incumbents who richly deserve to be retired rather than given a ticket for another six years in Washington. If Roberts loses his Kansas seat today—especially if the GOP falls one seat short of a majority—Tea Partiers will never let the establishment live that one down. Conservatives also still have hard feelings over the way the party leadership went all-out to save incumbent Thad Cochran in Mississippi even though he is another senator that grew roots in D.C. and replacing him as a nominee would not have cost the party the seat.

Erickson also takes a shot at Thom Tillis in North Carolina and David Perdue in Georgia. Both are not incumbents but still represent an establishment mentality that provides voters with unattractive choices rather than a fresh and principled conservative alternative.

This critique is consistent with the theme we’ve heard from many conservatives about the pitfalls of Republicans nominating so-called moderates for president like John McCain or Mitt Romney. This thesis holds that the party alienates its base and creates millions of missing Republican voters by putting forward certain losers without the passion of true conservatives. To that indictment, Erickson adds that this is largely the fault of consultants who profit handsomely from such losses.

There is something to be said for the argument that merely nominating respectable losers does nothing to advance the conservative cause or to stop the growth of the big-government monster that is devouring the U.S. economy and stealing more of our individual freedom every year. But the idea that the only choice before the GOP is between nominating fat cat losers and principled conservative winners is, like the straw men that President Obama likes to use as his favorite rhetorical device, a false choice. What Republicans need is not so much Tea Party fervor as it is political skill.

What Hastert and the K Street caucus that profited from past Republican majorities taught us is that Republicans need to be about more than just attempts to buy votes with government pork. But in 2010 and 2012, the right also taught it that putting forward candidates who can’t win the support of a majority of voters isn’t too smart either. Without the Tea Party insisting on nominating Sharron Angle for a Nevada race, Harry Reid would have been defeated in 2010. Nor should anyone on the right forget that putting forward Christine O’Donnell rather than a respectable GOP moderate ensured that the Democrats would win a seat in Delaware that they are likely to hold for a long time. The disdain for national leaders attempting to vet Senate candidates also seems absurd given what happened in Missouri when Rep. Todd Akin (an extreme social conservative rather than a Tea Partier) not only threw away a certain defeat of Democrat Claire McCaskill but also tarnished the Republican brand around the nation with his idiotic comments about rape and pregnancy.

These lessons should be remembered even when we look at what seem like reasonable criticisms of the establishment by Erickson. While re-nominating Roberts and even Cochran may be classified as unforced errors, what he’s leaving out of the discussion is the very real possibility that loose cannons such as Milton Wolf and Chris McDaniel might have sunk the party. In particular, it can be argued that keeping McDaniel, a former radio talker with a paper trail of wild comments a mile long, out of the general election might have been the smartest thing the GOP did all year since he might have been the 2014 version of Akin.

The question of what Republicans do with their majority if they win it is something we’ll find out in 2015. But you can’t govern without winning elections and that is something the Tea Party hasn’t always mastered. Too often, some of them seem more interested in fighting and destroying their slightly less conservative party opponents than in beating Democrats and then governing. Sour grapes from Tea Partiers about “hollow victories” strikes me as being just as absurd as the excuses already put forward by Democrats about why they are losing this election. If Rove, McConnell, and Co. have stopped them from blowing up another chance for a Republican majority, that is something that even the most dedicated conservatives should be celebrating tonight.

7 Responses to “Midterm Sour Grapes, Tea Party Edition”

Robert Welch died nearly thirty years ago—but his destructive spirit is alive and well. He literally considered liberal Republicans to be possibly genuine Communists. They were not looked upon as troublesome allies, but rather scum of the Earth. Combating Democrats often took a back seat to the desire of destroying them.

Mr Tobin could hardly contradict himself more than he has in this piece. From villifying the Tea Partiers to praising them, and praising establishment Republicans to vilifying them, he evinces a confusion in his own mind about the way forward. As a Tea Partier who was an avid supporter of Romney (that would be an absolute oxymoron in Mr. Tobin’s mind), I can verify that his demonization of wild eyed Tea Partiers tearing down the establishment Republicans is not what at least this Tea Partier is interested in. I have no problem with Pat Roberts, and pray he is victorious today. I pray for Republican victories across the land. There are no Republican candidates that I would sell my soul to see lected, but rather desparately long for Republican control of the Senate, followed by a good governing approach that effectively address the most serious problems facing the nation (the economy, national security). There are many things Republicans can do in these areas from funding and rebuilding the military, to reforming the tax code and entitlements and unleashing the energy sector and the banking and finance sectors to advance their interests while dismantling Dodd Frank and Obamacare. Reigning in the NSA is secondary to restoring legitimacy to our national institutions, from the CDC to the NSA to the iRS to the DOJ. One hopes the Republicans will stop the insanity that gave us Abscam and the donut hole but also that they will check Obama’s severe abuses of power and lawlessness, and begin to restore the legitimacy of representative government, which is now at the lowest ebb in my lifetime. Personally, I fear that the country is too far gone for anyone to fix it, but hope (not the Obama kind) springs eternal. My real fear is that the American people, the American electorate, has lost it’s character and will henceforth vote for entitlements and dependency and eschew limited government forever and anon. If the electorate doesn’t choose a different course in this election, then America is likely gone forever.

I noticed the same things Kent Lyon did and agree with many of his observations. I am very fearful that the Republicans — especially the anti-Tea Partier/Jeb Bush faction — are going to totally blow it once again and deliver the nation permanently into the hands of the Democrats, who today are essentially little more than fascists (and I use that term not to slander them, but simply because it is the most accurate description of their policy preferences).

I have a great deal of sympathy for Republicans who have problems with the Tea Party. They are anti-international, anti-interventionist, anti-moral dimension to politics, and indifferent to the issues which bring the religious conservatives, Christians, Jews, and others, into the equation. I don’t like sleeping with Ayn Rand.

If the Tea Party had remained true to its roots of fiscal sanity, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. But as soon as it was co-opted by the idiots on the Far Right who put social issues COMPLETELY un-addressed by the Constitution ABOVE the CONSTITUTIONAL issues that CREATED the Tea Party: enumerated powers and limited government, the far-right zealots became philosophically undifferentiated from the far-left Progressives: Screw Limited Government, Screw the Enumerated Powers of the Constitution, Legislate MY morality or you’re our enemy. The death of the Tea Party and the rise of what 53% of Americans say they want – a 3rd Party that offers a fiscally sane limited government under the Rule of Law not traipsing around the world looking for a fight (ie Libertarian), the better. The Tea Party killed themselves and I – an attendee at the first event in Searchlight with huge motivation for the goals of fiscal sanity and limited government – can’t WAIT for it to die.

“… the kind of disasters that cost the party golden opportunities to win the Senate in 2010 and 2012″

Yes, but for those wonderful Tea Party types like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, et al. the Republicans would have won the Senate then. And the prospect of the likes of Ted Cruz having still greater influence going forward, is real reason for despair.